With the rapid development and improvement of mobile internet and internet of things (“IoT”), new shopping modes like online shopping and TV shopping have become ubiquitous. However, traditional mall and supermarket shopping still play an important role in daily life due to the advantages of directness and convenience.
Although the prior shopping modes are universally welcomed, they also have the following shortcomings:
Along the continuous expansion of shopping malls and supermarkets, shoppers and administrators still face several inconveniences and discomforts. For instance, the shopping area is too big for a shopper to find what he wants or learn the details about the items efficiently; and, long lines at the shopping mall create frustration and a waste of time. Rather than wait in long lines to purchase their items, many shoppers may simply decide not to purchase any items, bringing economic loss and operating pressure to the shopping malls and supermarkets.
The patent CN103136879A discloses an intelligent restaurant checkout counter, which has no application outside the restaurant context because all of the plates and commodities need to be electronically tagged. For increasing the using cost of each commodity in the supermarket, this solution obviously cannot be applicable for all commodities. Although the cost of an electronic tag can be ignored for those high-valued commodities, many supermarkets inevitably sell some low-valued commodities, for which the cost of an electronic tag simply cannot be ignored. Additionally, the difficult reutilization of the electronic tags is also an unacceptable expenditure for both the manufactures and the merchants. To manufacturers, it means not only the cost of the electronic tags, but also an improvement of the related manufacturing process. Further, the patent CN102708489A disclosed an intelligent supermarket shopping system based fusing RFID and 3G technologies, which also fails to verify each shopper's behavior. Consequently, the shopper's purchasing power is not optimized. Meanwhile, this shopping system requires each shopping cart to be equipped with an intelligent terminal, resulting in a difficult engineering implementation.
In conclusion, the shopping environment of the traditional shopping malls and supermarkets are low-efficient, and the new shopping modes can severely impact the traditional ones if the shortcomings in the prior art cannot be overcome.